It will take time to fix user behaviour on deep discounting: Anubhab Goel

With deals, special sale periods, curated offerings and aggressive marketing and promotion push, e-commerce players have been having a bonanza time during the festive season this year. As the festivities reach a crescendo, Adgully takes a look at how various e-commerce players are leveraging the buying frenzy this year.

Festive season also brings on the need to rejuvenate one’s home – be it renovations, buying new household goods and appliances, painting the house, extensive cleaning and repairing work and lots more. One such player in this domain is Zimmber, a leading On-Demand Home Services Company founded by a group of entrepreneurs.

In conversation with Adgully, Anubhab Goel, CEO and Founder, Zimmber, speaks about his company’s strategy to tap the festive season fervour and how the company has been working towards a shift from heavy discounting. Excerpts:

What marketing spends have you allocated for this festive season? How does it compare with the spends last year?

I won’t be able to share exact figures, but it is 10x of the previous season.

What are some of the strategies that you have adopted to boost sales during this festive season?

During this season, there’s a lot of demand for home cleaning and colouring homes. So, we are very bullish on these services. Even for our other orders we are employing cross-selling strategies to boost Home Deep Cleaning, Sofa Cleaning, Carpet Cleaning and Colour Your Home services.

What are the distinguishing factors of your strategy that set you apart from other players?

Other than our quality and service offering, we emphasise a lot on scaling our supply side, so we don’t disappoint our customers by refusing to accept their bookings.

How are you planning to counter competition from other e-commerce players?

We don’t really believe in heavy discounting, be it season or off season. We will continue to edge out our competition on our excellent service quality and word of mouth.

What are your expectations from this festive season in terms of sales revenue?

We can’t share exact number, but the two-month long festive season is expected to account for more than 30 per cent of our yearly revenues.

Do you see a slight slowdown in the market sentiment this year? Why?

Not really. We are seeing more orders this year compared to last year. Mainly because most of the services we offer are something you need anyways. We are not in the game of discounting, so we have always had users for convenience and service quality and not only for discounted prices. 

What are the implications of restrictions on deep discounting by the DIPP (Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion)? How will it impact you?

We anyways don’t play on deep discounting, so it won’t really impact us. I think the deep discounting culture is what has brought us here. And it will take a long time to fix the user behaviour, but once companies start providing real value and convenience, people will automatically get hooked to these services even if the price is the same as offline.

What steps are you taking to differentiate your offerings in the e-commerce market?

We are creating a lot of combo packages in services like Home Deep Cleaning, Salon at Home services, Home Makeover, etc., to offer people a good deal as well as increase our revenue.

Do you think that premium or special offerings (for example, Amazon Prime) are playing a significant role in giving e-commerce players an advantage?

If the offering is premium in terms of value-add, then definitely it plays a huge role. Features like Prime are genius, because they lock you in with a particular brand. In fact, I’m giving you money in advance for not going to the competitor. What could be better than this?